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Gillette Pulls RFID Tags In UK Amid Protests
akb writes "Indymedia UK is reporting that after protests against the trial of RFID tags by Gillette at a Tesco store in Cambridge, increasing press coverage, a boycott, and the growing mobilisation of campaigners against the intrusive use of the technology, Gillette have withdrawn their trial. RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags are small tags containing a microchip which can be 'read' by radio sensors over short distances (for background see SchNEWS Feature / 2 part Guardian Article)."
We keep hearing about the bad uses for RFID technology, but do people know of any good uses that don't invade on our privacy?
RFID tags have the potential problem of a thief scanning my house to see what I have inside.
Conductive ink on bendable material including printable, disposable antennas seem to be right around the corner. Here's a pdf from Rochester with all the chemistry that goes into making the substrates. And an article from Business 2.0 on Plastic transistors (Google cache) and how they will change UPS tracking and WalMart's forever.
The most interesting aspect for me is that these sensors (or even on-chip flash) will be powered and read in the presence of an RF field, like how most RFID tags work. We might one day have tons of passive sensors 'waiting' to be read with an active energy source.
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I work for a contractor of FedEx. FedEx owns or rents hundreds of buildings around town, and all of them are protected in some manner or another. Most of the properties are linked up via an electronic access control system which makes use of RFID-enabled cards. The cards are called "proximity cards," or "proxy cards" for short.
The system consists of two components, a proxy card and a card reader. The readers are mounted at the doors of many FedEx buildings, and the proxy card itself is worn or held by employees. Each employee has a unique proxy card. The cards are manufactured by a GE subsidiary, Casi-Rusco.
It's an amazing system. When you walk near the door of a FedEx building, you simply wave your proxy card near (..within the "proximity" of..) the reader. The reader, which emits a signal, activates the RFID chip within your proxy card, and your card sends back its unique ID which in turn is tied to your employee/vendor code. Instantly - within a fraction of a second - the database is checked to determine whether or not you're allowed to open that door. If so, the door unlocks momentarily; if not, it remains locked.
As much as I hate "consumer-grade" RFID, it really is incredibly powerful (and, I imagine, rather convenient) in terms of access control.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
True, true. If the market bears the current prices, and a drop in costs does not change the fact that profits are maximized at that price, then you are correct.
Consider this. You are selling 300 units of an item at $3.00 everyday, at a cost of about $2.50 a pop. Every bit of research says that that is the price that you are maximizing profits. If you lowered the price, you sell more units, but not enough to actually increase profits. If you raise the price, the number of customers drops so much that profits are reduced.
All of a sudden, you find a way to sell the exact same item at a cost of $2.00! While your profits will double at the current price, who's to say they won't increase even more if you lower the price a tad?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
This RFID thing is a dead horse. Shoot it and get over it. Until large companies start getting the idea that most people prefer control over their privacy, these sorts of technology will be regulated to the military and the police.
And boy, will they embrace it bigtime.
And looking at the other side of the coin, how long before somebody creates a RFID zapper gun?
*cough* Tesla *cough*
Just my two cents.
It's not just a UPC symbol. A RFID circuit could potentially have it's 'id' read when you move a box from the shelf. As you walk around the store, more readers could read in real-time where the box is and generate a profile of where you stopped and for how long. This could be linked to the final purchase and your credit history and past purchasing habits. They could then sell this information to other stores. Grocery stores would die for this capability and it is also coming soon to your shopping cart (and/or optical systems in the aisles).
This isn't conspiracy theory non-sense (necessarily). And it isn't sci-fi. You could implement this system TODAY with enough readers and a few linux boxes.. (I suppose you'd need a hardware interface, a database and an IT guy with a few lackeys.. probably need to make a web friendly front end.. interface with corporate database..)
It's interesting to see people in England rejecting these things so quickly and so thoroughly. It leaves one to wonder how we will react to them if they are given a trial in the United States.
After all, part of the mythos of our national character is that we are rugged individualists who only want to be left alone, but we regularly put up with the knowlege that various private and government agencies develop and deploy some of the most sophisticated intrusive security technologies in the world (e.g., public security cameras, biometrics, face recognition, gait recognition, cellular phone location, productivity logging etc, etc, ad nauseum...) and with that often in the pursuit of genuinely base motives.
This raises a question: 'Which of our faces will we in the U.S. turn towards a technology that, for a brief interval at least, simply does away with the privacy inherent in the inability of anyone anywhere to know precisely where you are?'
In one of the messages above, someone asked if there were any good uses for the technology and I think I can see the technology revolutionizing point-of-sale technologies for credit/debit card use; possibly reproducing the scenario in the speculative IBM commercial where someone shops in a supermarket by stuffing items in his coat and walking out of the place, only to be stopped by a security guard who reminds him to take the receipt for his purchases.
Basically, if a system knows you are carrying x items of y value that belong to the store until you walk them past a point where their cost is deducted from your account, you can eliminate cashiers. Of course, what those girls who operate supermarket cash registers do with themselves after you do is anyone's guess.
One more interesting thing is that these are electronic devices that have to send a signal in order to function: they have *got* be vulnerable to something.
Perhaps part of your transaction in your point-of-sale system of the future could be frying the tags one the items to mark them as sold which would also take care of the paranoia problem.
Before anyone mentions it: buying, selling or possessing any of the Russian or Taiwanese tag-zappers that would soon hit the market would be punishable by fine, imprisonment or both.
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As alarming as many of the recent seemingly "invasive" technologies are, the response to consumer anger from some of the organizations which employ those technologies has been a bit comforting. Before we have seen the termination of serial numbers on Pentium 3 CPU's, the removal of DRM in TurboTax software and even Microsoft allowing OEM's to omit product activation with WindowsXP.
All of these were the result of massive consumer backlash and lack of benefits for the producer. With Gillette's action added to this, it seems that Palladium/TCPA/etc. might not be in for a very warm reception, and possibly a very quick withdrawal. And it seems that some corporations care more about consumer feelings than it seems at first.
It's a trust issue. We don't trust them to not use the data we give them and they gather against us and in ways we don't like.
RFID, like any other tech, is generally designed to be useful. I actually like the idea of no checker, it saves me time and so long as I can still pay in cash and have a checker if I want, I'm happy. The checkers are replaced by fewer support personell, some of them are kept and the rest are put on either shelf duty or are fired, who can then in theory go and get a better edumication and help to build better systems such as space exploration vehicles or something of the like.
The problem is that corperations are notoriously cheap and they'll do anything to cut costs, including genoside, slavery, extortion, election rigging, forcing workers in different countries to compete for who works for the lowest wages, etc.
Do I want a bunch of criminals in wallmart knowing what I buy, where I live, etc? No. Any information they have is power over me and I don't trust them any more than I trust a mass murderer living next door.
So, if they can earn my trust by not being cheap and BSing us about this, then mabye I wouldn't be up in arms. Although we all know where all this grand automation is going to land us if corperations have their way; the poor house. The IT technician that gets replaced by a foreign worker now works as a bagger at cub foods, who is replaced by a machine. They then goto starbucks, where the people there are replaced by machines that make coffie, they then goto work at burger king, where a fully automated system is setup to make everything. When robots become viable, they'll be stocking shelves for us. Where will all those jobs go and where will the money go? All the jobs go away, the systems are designed to support thousands of people but nobody has any money because there's no work to be had, and the work there is to be had pays so lousy that you can barely make a living.
These people won't just die, they'll protest, violently and otherwise. They'll break into stores, people's houses, buy and steal weaponry and kill and plunder to get what they need. If the goverment does things like increase the vote percentage to get federal funding to %15 when Ralph nader gets %5 of the vote, you'd better believe they'll raise it to %30 when he gets %15, and 50% when he gets %30. What happens when he gets a vast majority? Lets just hope by then the corperations don't have a milita of their own that they can use to kill us all. I don't like how the next 10-20 years are looking at all.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
.. because i live in cambridge. the sainsbury's across town (a competitor, for all you non-UK types) does exactly the same trick to monitor the consumer but doesn't even try to conceal their efforts behind a chip. if you try to buy the same gillette blades there you have to physically explain to an actual person that you want the blades, that you're not going to nick them, that you might want specifically the gillette ones as opposed to some in-house crap, etc etc. so let's not get too excited about an invasion of privacy simply because it involves electronics. (yes i do realise that this is /., and no i don't work for tesco).
This protest seems to me rather over the top, tinfoil helmet to me.
Of course, if nobody does anything, RFIDs could be used to infring liberty.
But what ills are not overcome by requiring that RFIDs should be clearly marked, and removable without damaging the goods to which they are attached. On items with packaging, such as the razors, they should be in the packaging. On items without packaging such as clothes, attache them with thos little plastic tags they already use for prices and useless information about the manufacturer.
To police it, ensure that an inexpensive scanner is available which allows a domestic user to detect any RFIDs thay have not removed. The fine on the company in the event of infringing the above rules (i.e. putting hidden RFIDs im) to include an element of reward to the finder of the hidden ID of at least the cost of such a scanner.
If you then remove all IDs when you get home - no more onerous than unpacking and removing those tags, then the only time the shop knows about them is as you leave for the first time. If you paid for them, they know that from the checkout. If you didn't, then presumably you are stealing them and deserve what happens to you.
This doesn't require wholesale observance to make it destroy the effective use to infringe privacy impossible. If more people than not remove the RFIDs (as they would) the residual information becomes effectively useless.
Of course, the CIA could always attach an RFID to your backside and track you wherever - but no law or consumer protest is going to stop that.
If it works, it could allow shops to cut losses by (say) 5%. If the marketplace works, this should cut end user prices by (say) 4.95%. Which may not sound be much, but if I got a 5% pay rise today (which is the same thing), I would go home happy.
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